Jerusalem Days
by Spinnd
Summary: One-shot take on the closing scene between Lucas and Sarah in 8.06. Heavily Lucas-centric. *Spoilers for 8.06, obviously.


**Disclaimer**: BBC, Kudos; they own it all.

**Warnings**: *Spoilers for 8.6.

**A/N: **Because Lucas': "take me with you" to Sarah made no sense at all, fic had to be written to explain it somehow. Fic, therefore, may also make no sense at all due to tangential, liberal use of creativity. Nonetheless, readings and reviews are always appreciated.

* * *

"This isn't fair is it," she tells him as her voice splinters with emotion, "you deserve more than this."

He swallows the irony and his mouth goes dry.

"No. This isn't fair."

Then, he is taken back to years gone. With those words, he is thirteen again, and scared.

_His mother is kneeling by the bedside of a man stricken and wasting away with a cancer he can't even begin to pronounce. She doesn't notice him for the while, standing silent by the foot of the bed. When she does - and she does, eventually - she wipes at her damp cheeks, takes him by the hand and smiles through her tears._

"_He asked for you. He wants you to know that he loves you. No matter what."_

_He doesn't quite understand until she slips his hand into the palm lying cold and motionless atop the quilt._

"_Dad?" He squeezes hard with his fingers, but unlike the days in the months before, he elicits no response._

"_Mum?" He turns, feeling a fist of fear wrap, clenching, around his heart. "Mum?"_

_He sees the tears and he panics at the thought resounding in his head that his father – no no, he can't be. He can't. This isn't right. This isn't __**fair**__. _

_Two days later, in the cold and wet of cemetery, his mother breaks down as the coffin descends into the ground._

"_Take me with you!" She begs, arms reaching for the brown rain-slicked wood._

_That night, in the dark of his room, he weeps, for he remembers the certainty in her voice and had seen the statement truth in her eyes._

Like the statement truth in _her_ eyes; green eyes, grieving, helpless in the face of the circumstances playing out before them, unable to but stay the course.

"Goodbye, Lucas."

The end comes at him down the barrel of a shaking gun.

"_Take me with you." _His mother's words, all those years ago. Yet she had lived, long after her husband was gone. Long enough to see her daughter marry off to America and her son graduate from university and join the 9th & 12th Lancers.

It had been a stroke that took her, one autumn evening. A year later, he joined the Service.

"_Take me with you."_

On his knees (because what other option was there?), he hears his mother's voice in the song of a rhyme. Closes his eyes, and sees her through the eyes of a six-year-old; soft and lovely in her blue summer frock, backlit by the morning light streaming through the kitchen window. Smiling. Happy.

He believes in a Heaven, and in a God, and though he is more Thomas than Peter, he remembers that even Peter once denied his Lord three times. And in this afterlife, if he could be with them again, could see his father strong and his mother radiant…

He's not thirteen, and he's not scared anymore.

"Take me with you."

- -

Click and the slam of a door, and cold reality rushes back, a wave breaking over his head, and he gasps as frozen time thaws, trickling through his brain, seeping down his spine.

He's alive. She has left him alive.

The sudden weight of realisation threatens to crush him, her betrayal hastening back with a vengeance, clawing and grasping and eager to drag him down deep and forever out of the sun. He reaches frantically, but the images had already begun to recede from his mind's eye, and soon he is left only with the stark blackness of closed lids and the metallic tang of blood in the air.

_I hate you, _he tells Sarah, tells the world. Tells himself, mainly.

_I love you,_ he tells Sarah that too, and it only cuts in deeper. _I loved you._

_I'm sorry._

The last he says aloud, breathes it past trembling lips, and in so doing he holds to him that one last vision of two figures standing before him, tall and proud.

Of his parents, still smiling. Still waiting.


End file.
